DEE HocK: WW eet eee THE parents in a cramped, two-room house. “Nobody was abysmally poor and nobody was obscenely rich,” Mr. Hock says. “It was a culture of sharing. You couldn’t get sick without someone leaving food at your doorstep. “It was a fun-loving, family-oriented society. If you held a steady job, didn’t lie, paid your bills and attended to the simple virtues, you were considered a fine, upstanding person.” What he most remembers is the “extraordinary work ethic” of that era. As a young teenager, Mr. Hock spent summers picking fruit for two cents a pound. In other summers, he found jobs in a dairy, a military depot and a slaughterhouse. “T was pretty proud of being able to go in and do a man’s job,” he recalled, “At the same time, while the people at those jobs were good, decent, hardworking people, I knew that I needed options in my life.” Surprisingly, the eloquent man who would one day brush shoulders with the rich and famous of the world was a shy little boy in Utah. “I was always happier alone than being in a crowd,” he says. Mr. Hock fell in love with reading, which he regards as the most important education for a business person. The young Mr. Hock devoured everything he could get his hands on. He especially liked the children’s books known as Big Little Books, which sold for a nickel. “T found school as dull as ditch water,” he says, laughing. “I was consumed by utter, total, frantic boredom. I can’t remember ever bringing home a schoolbook.” Like many young men, Mr. Hock dreamed of being a baseball or football player until he tore leg muscles during a football practice. The intellectual playing field was more friendly. A high school teacher who noticed Mr. Hock’s way with words persuaded him to join the debate team. The rest is Utah debate history. Mr. Hock and his debating partner went undefeated that year and won the state high school championship. The future VISA executive also placed high in extemporaneous speaking. In the final championship round, Mr. Hock and his teammate took sweet satisfaction in beating the wealthier students from Ogden High School, which boasted “a new brick school up on the hill.” Mr. Hock grins at the old memories. “We had utter contempt for them,” he says. A year later, the smooth-talking Mr. Hock and his partner won a national debate championship as members of the Weber College debate team. KING OF VISA The rough-and-tumble world of debate taught Mr. Hock the art of persuasion and clear thinking under pressure. The clash of ideas, the research and public speaking skills, the political gamesmanship — all proved keen training for his later work in the business world. “Tt was a microcosm of what you run into in life every time you meet somebody,” he says. After college, Mr. Hock and his longtime sweetheart — the former Feral Cragun of Pleasant View whom he had known since the fourth grade — got married. While she toiled as a seamstress, he worked as a laborer and hod carrier, hauling bricks for a brick mason. “We were flat broke without a dime to our name, living in a basement apartment and too proud to say anything to our parents,” he says. A brother-in-law gave him a lead for a job in a finance company. For his interview, Mr. Hock roared into Ogden in a ’34 Chevy that had lost its muffler. He got the job. Six months later, at 21, he was named office manager. In the coming years, the young man from Ogden worked at several different jobs in finance. Twice, he was fired after run-ins with bosses he regarded as dishonest and unethical. Not one to carry personal grudges or bitterness, Mr. Hock declined to talk about those incidents. “T was convinced I was a failure, that I would never rise in business because it was so rotten to its core,” he says. “Those experiences toughen you, teach you that life goes on. I swore that if I ever ran anything, I would never tolerate the atrocious things I was seeing in business.” Ironically, the future credit-card king, also vowed that he would never again let his family slip into debt and owe money to anyone. Shortly after his baptism in the cold, cruel world, Mr. Hock gave birth to the VISA card. In creating it, Mr. Hock says he was simply modernizing a very old business concept. Credit cards have existed for centuries, but were a rarity in the era before World War II. At that time, only a handful of department stores, oil companies and airlines offered retail and gasoline cards to the public. The post-war economic boom and the rise of the middle-class changed everything. Consumers wanted more and more purchasing power. The phrases “Cash or charge?” and “Do you take plastic?” zoomed into the American lexicon. As a finance officer at the Rainier Bank in Seattle, in the late 1960s, Mr. Hock led a consortium of bankers that restructured and bought the Bank of America’s domestic bank card system. A few DEE HockK: THE years later, Mr. Hock’s new company purchased Bank of America’s entire foreign card system. Then, in 1977, Mr. Hock and his brainstorming executives came Se i INN W Vy ") Wy KING OF VISA envisaged,” says Nilson, editor of The Nilson Report. “There have been a lot of refinements, but it’s basically the same.” VISA’s numbers stagger the mind. The company boasts 300 up with their masterstroke: The VISA concept. The team created a million cardholders and 19,000 member institutions around the universal financial tool, the VISA card, with a name that could be world, according to Dave Brancoli, vice president of communications for VISA. pronounced easily around the world. VISA International, based in San Mateo, Calif., would be the administrative brains of this vast VISA dominates its industry. In 1991, VISA held a 51 percent credit network. And VISA’s member institutions— thousands of banks and financial institutions in hundreds of countries — would offer the card and its services. The business structure may sound simple nowadays, but it was revolutionary 15 years ago. As Mr. Hock puts it, “We ended up inventing a whole new concept of business that never existed before.” The birth of VISA, Mr. Hock explained, seemed strange and different because it was “surrounded by paradox. We had to create a new con- share of the global market, while its closest competitors, MasterCard cept in the most conservative, tradition-bound institution of the business world. It had to be not subject to any regulatory authority in the world. Its name had to be short and graphic and pronounceable in every part of the world and it had to transcend culture, currency and laws.” The beauty of VISA, he says, was in its sim- plicity of design and execution. “Our global business is done by millions of constituent parts which never have to be capitalized,” he says. “The smallest bank in Arkansas can become a member on the same basis as the largest bank in the world.” Mr. Hock saw the VISA card not as a traditional product to sell to customers, but as a paperless vehicle that simplified the buying and selling of goods for busy consumers, merchants and bankers. “Our business was the exchange of value, so our product had to be transformed into an exchange of value,” he says. Mr. Hock says that VISA only could have emerged in an open corporate atmosphere that nurtures creativity. To that end, the VISA president trashed the formal corporate hierarchy and the traditional, authoritarian style of management. Bureaucracy became a dirty word. Staff meetings and paperwork were frowned upon. Dress codes disappeared. Mr. Hock and his lieutenants met informally to toss around ideas. Charles Russell, Mr. Hock’s protege and successor at the helm of VISA, once called the company a “think tank.” Eight years after Mr. Hock retired, VISA still follows his general corporate philosophy. “Essentially, VISA is still doing what he and American Express, trailed at 29 percent and 14 percent respectively. VISA also runs the world’s largest network of automated teller machines, with 100,000 ATMs in 50 nations. If VISA were sold today, Mr. Hock estimates it would be worth $60 billion. And he believes the card has reached only the early Stages of its ultimate potential as a financial tool. Its future is nearly limitless, Mr. Hock says. “I may not live long enough to see the full realization of my dream,” he says, smiling. “If that’s so, then I’ve succeeded.” Today, Mr. Hock and his wife (“one of the smartest, toughest persons I know”) live on a 200acre ranch estate in Northern California. The property was barren when they bought it, so the couple had 10,000 trees planted, miles of roads and trails built and a trout pond installed. They also designed their own home, a spacious structure with gorgeous, sweeping views of the countryside. Mr. Hock leads a fairly quiet retirement life. Occasionally, he’ll give talks to business groups and schools on his philosophy of management. (Teaching, he says, is a career he may pursue in the near future.) Much of his time is spent reading, reflecting, or writing. He also spends hours relaxing with his wife, his children and grandchildren. “For a long time, my grandchildren only knew me as their nice grandpa, the guy who took them for hikes to the trout pond,” says Mr. Hock. “Now they’re getting into their teens and they understand credit cards. When they found out who I am, they thought it was kind of neat.” Mr. Iwata is a free-lance writer in Stanford, Calif.